c. 65 million abortions so far in the US, that's a lot of lost kids. I don't have stats on divorce-rape, but there are no doubt millions of men robbed of their children by the wonder of civilisation and it's new-fangled laws, all designed to increase misery and profits for big biz. And we're seeing millions afflicted with health issues like obesity, caused in the main by big biz promoting junk food, and big biz leeching on the healthcare.

Give me a stone hut or a cave with my tribe any day over this Godless shit-show.

I think you have the relationship between civilization and gut parasites completely backwards.
Also, high mortality is a hallmark of agricultural societies, not of hunter-gatherers and much less so (at least) of herders. The latter two were far healthier (better bones, teeth, no signs of malnutrition etc) and taller than the former, and the herders used to overrun cultivators every generation or two (history is full of such examples).
Neither hunter-gatherers nor herders had a large population density, and there was no intensive population expansion (increasing population density), but an extensive one (spreading out over a large area).

An extensive, low-density culture of herders trading with each other is still a civilization, albeit very different from modern civilization. (Perhaps they need to build some nice buildings to count as a civilization - they can do that.) That alone is reason enough to say "yes, some civilizations can be good."

"Best possible world ideal" is not something that can be answered, though, imo.

Give me a stone hut or a cave with my tribe any day over this Godless shit-show.

Click to expand...

Oh yeah. Cultural growth and degeneration also drives the cycle. I forgot to mention that. In the latter phase of a civilization's development, people forget why their society's institutions were created in the first place. Vital knowledge is lost as noise slowly creeps into the system.

"If Glosoli would like to return to the forum and contribute in a productive manner, he is welcome to post in the Public or Typed sections of The Thal Hall.

Two caveats:

1. If Glosoli posts here, my current "no-contact" agreement with him will be unworkable and come to an end. I'll resume noticing his behaviors, and he is free to call me out however he feels like.

2. Glosoli must follow the general guidelines of The Thal Hall and will be subject to my moderation as Baron of TTH. Disagreement is usually fine. Personal escalation past a certain point will get the "warn, suspend, ban treatment" like anyone else."

Just realized I didn't answer the question of "should civilization fall". I'm gonna go with no because those things don't fall gently.

If we have to roll back to steppe herders and hunter-gatherers to get out of civilization territory, then I would agree that small, close-knit tribes would be pretty great. Just so long as you weren't one of the tribes to get killed off entirely in a territory dispute. I'd miss the internet if we lived in tree stumps, but it'd probably be a great life overall.

Now free range hunter gatherers use up a lot of land. No $5 chicken warehouses here, gotta ramble and roam. Herder life requires fewer people using more land, as far as I can tell.
How many people would have to die to get back to hunter-gatherer/herder carrying capacity?

If we have to get to steppe herders and hunter-gatherers to roll back out of civilization, we gotta go pre-colonial. How many Native Americans existed before US inflicted civilization on them?

"While it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus,[6] estimates range from a low of 2.1 million[7] to 7 million[8] people to a high of 18 million.[9]"

Let's say 50 million people in North America before you have to start using modern food production methods, cultivation, or anything else that starts looking suspiciously like civilization. Over double the historical high estimate. (From what I looked up, the population carrying capacity of the planet is 100mil for hunter gatherers. Maybe more, certainly less than 7 billion.)

326 - 50 = ~276 million people have to die in the fall of civilization, minimum.

AKA civilization kills a lot of kids with abortions, but also enables millions of kids more to grow up and live full lives. A hunter-gatherer society requires you to sacrifice hundreds of millions of potential kids. A fall of civilization requires you to sacrifice 250 million or so people, a good amount of them kids.

Is it worth it for most of the country to die so we can live in tree stumps and hunt the buffalo with our close knit small tribe?

Maybe you don't care about 276 million people dying so long as you can get rid of Cherry Coke and Planned Parenthood. Fuck those guys, probably godless heathens anyway.

What's the population of Christians that has to die to get back to hunter/gatherer carrying capacity?

That's looking like 73% of the country still identifying as Christian. 73% of 276 million is *squints* 201 million, rounded down.

Is it worth it for 201 million Christians to die so that we can live in a stone hut or a cave with our tribe?

Obviously many of those people are fake Christians or otherwise not to your tastes. The number of doctrinally sound, high quality believers you would want to share a stone hut with will probably much lower than the nominal Christian population. I don't think any mass extinction event including the Rapture will 100% spare genuine Christians. (Rapture pulls all the true believers to heaven, everyone left to share a stone cave with will be gone.) Can't kill off 276 million or so and only leave the cool kids, there's gonna be some percentage of Genuine Christians killed off in the transition.

Is it worth it for 20 million True Christians to die so that we can go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? If not, what number is acceptable?

The other side of this is if we never had civilization (agriculture, society, SCALE-enabling technologies, etc.), we wouldn't have the carrying capacity for {your tribe here} in such numbers. The question in that case would be... Is it better for 200 million Christians to have never been born to keep the small tribe life around?

(or whatever {your group here}'s adjusted population number would be, not picky)

The other side of this is if we never had civilization (agriculture, society, SCALE-enabling technologies, etc.), we wouldn't have the carrying capacity for {your tribe here} in such numbers. The question in that case would be... Is it better for 200 million Christians to have never been born to keep the small tribe life around?

(or whatever {your group here}'s adjusted population number would be, not picky)

Click to expand...

There's a quality of life factor here. Modern civilization is actually negative, in the sense that it's dysgenic (our genes are gradually getting worse). Anything that results in overall growth instead of overall decline would be a net positive, no matter how much lower the population has to be.

That said, you have a good point, and it's worth looking for solutions that produce a net positive without requiring some form of mass slaughter to free up resources. (On the other hand, a mass dieoff might be unavoidable as part of leaving a system that many people are adapted to... deaths for that reason would be OK.)

Without post-1965 immigration, the population in the us would be much lower now. 250 millions ? 200 millions ?
If every generation of women only had 1,5 children per women, then the size of a generation will halve every two generations. Meaning that four generations and one later (the latter because of population pyramid imbalance), the population would be about one-fourth, which brings us to a figure close to 62,5-50 millions.
Note that the white fertility rate in the us wasn't too far removed from 1,5 in the late 70s - later it rose (to about 2,0?), mostly I think because of highly religious people and the underclass. A generation is about 30 years, so the non-highly-religious, non-underclass white population could have already accomplished a third of the shrinking process (30*5 years) by 2018.
The problem of population growth leading to either intensive pressure (adoption of agriculture) or extensive pressure (emigration and attempts at conquest) is solved by avoiding population growth (keeping one's population stable). This doesn't work, of course, if a group:
- doesn't care,
- believes that it has a right to expand (or that it is commanded to do so).

So there is no need for any apocalyptic scenario - you only need a sense of responsibility, solidarity and long-term thinking ("low time preference") over several generations. This is possible - see re-forestation in japan, german states, or the building of cathedrals (which took several generations).
The higher the population density (in relation to soil and climate), the longer the process will take (and/or the stronger the generational shrinking has to be).

Lower birthrate is indeed a way to reduce population without an extinction event.

I'd say that avoiding population growth only works so long as not even a single population does high birthrate instead. If you're responsibly lowering birthrate and some country near you is having a baby boom, pretty soon they're going to start eyeing all that extra space it looks like you have.